In the rut of the rather suitably named Death Valley , researchers mean they may have uncovered one of the early ever mass animate being strandings . conserve in the rock for some 540 million years , the corpse of the smack of jellyfish couldprovide us with a good understandingabout what sprightliness was like not in the oceans , but rather on land back then .
When the Portuguese man-of-war happen themselves in their awkward predicament , Death Valley was not the scorching desert it is today , but or else an intertidal zone . The fact that in the modern Clarence Shepard Day Jr. this habitat is tap by a massive range of animal from all major groups reflects its grandness to life . Yet fossil grounds of this environment is rarified and hard to descend by , meaning that those that are found ply an unbelievable window into the palaeobiology of these regions .
When researcher receive a small meter - feather section of rock containing the remains of 13 jellyfish frozen in time , the implication was not lost on them . As reported inGeological Magazine , it appeared to show how a group of Cambrian medusozoa , or “ jellyfish ” , got traverse up and out of the shallow ocean as wave lapped them closer to the beach and leave them stranded on the shoreline .
This in itself indicates that the jellyfish cruising the seas hundreds of millions of years ago behaved in a similar way to those that carry on to do so today , aggregating in chemical group as they bob around looking for plankton to feed upon . But the remains also suggest at what things were like above the water .
The riveting matter about these fossils is how they come about in the first place . The preservation of indulgent - bodied being are rare enough in itself due to the frangibility of such brute and the intensity of the fossilisation appendage . However , if a load of jellyfish were to be washed onto a beach in modern prison term , it is improbable anything would be left behind to be fossilized in the first berth , as magpie would more than likely pick them aside and eat them .
So how did a baker ’s 12 of Portuguese man-of-war come to be stuck in time to be dug up 540 million years later ? Well the researchers suspect that it is because there were simply few or even no telluric animals about at the time to destruct them . In accession to that , they also think that the beach were likely cover in blockheaded microbial mats that would also have helped form a crust around the Portuguese man-of-war , aiding the chance they would eventually be preserved .
[ H / T : New Scientist ]
